Tilt - Alan Cumyn [44]
His father had a beard and was eating bean soup.
They always had meat and potatoes when he lived with them.
Feldon, his new brother, was leaning both skinny elbows on the table.
His real father would have straightened him up.
His mother had not thrown Ron and Feldon out of the house yet. Instead she had put on a nice blouse and Gary wasn’t even around. Gary had been replaced by Ron.
No one was saying anything about it.
Or about the new toilet, which was in place but not to be flushed, apparently.
“So how were the fish biting, Stanley?” his father asked.
Lily sneezed prodigiously all over everybody’s food.
“I don’t think they caught anything but colds,” Stan’s mother said.
Stan wiped his bowl clean with a last bit of biscuit. Was there more? He felt like Oliver Twist.
One wrong word and the whole fishbowl was going to explode.
“Can I bring Feldon to school tomorrow and show him to my friends?” Lily asked in her sweetest voice. Mucus hung from her nostril.
“Wipe your nose, please,” his mother said. “Feldon is not anybody’s show and tell. Your father and Feldon will be moving on. Maybe tomorrow?” She eyed Ron, but he kept eating.
He was not sitting at the head of the table. He seemed a lot smaller than he used to.
“Your father called Kelly-Ann this afternoon,” Stan’s mother announced in an all-is-under-control voice. She passed around a salad that no one wanted. The leafy greens were a bit black on the edges. Ron moved it aside. “Everything’s straight. Isn’t it, Ron?” she said.
Ron seemed fascinated with his last crust of biscuit.
“You figure you’ll be heading home in the next couple of days.” Stan’s mother hardened her eyes toward Ron.
“Or sooner,” Ron said brightly. He was not a bright man — Stan could see that now. When a dim man suddenly became bright, something was wrong.
A car passed in the street with headlights blazing, and the parallel universe held. Lily finally wiped her nose with a napkin and Feldon blew little bubbles onto his spoon.
The phone rang then and Stan wished it was Janine. Maybe she was calling to say she’d been thinking about him all day, really thinking, and had decided she wasn’t a lesbian after all.
Nobody moved at the table. The phone rang, rang.
“Why do people phone during the dinner hour?” Stan’s mother said.
Stan heard his own voice from the answering machine in the kitchen inviting the caller to say a few words after the beep.
Beep.
No words.
“Telemarketers,” Stan’s mother said.
Maybe. But why were they the last family in civilization not to have call display?
Money. That was why.
Lesbians didn’t just decide to not be lesbians anymore. Did they? Stan felt foggy on the subject. Some people were bi. Did they know at this age?
Maybe Janine was just trying him out. Her first boy.
Maybe she ran away after the kiss because she was confused.
Maybe she was waiting by the phone, wondering if he would call.
He’d never called her. Maybe that’s what she wanted now.
Feldon studied his spoon. He had hardly eaten anything.
Then Ron looked at everyone with his droopy eyes and said, “I just wanted to tell you how much it means to me to be here. We’re all family. I know it’s hard to deal with sometimes, but in the end it’s all we’ve got. I really believe that.”
Feldon dropped his spoon, and brown mush soup oozed onto the floor. Nobody moved. Stan’s mother was looking at her husband — at her ex-husband
— with such . . . what?
Like he’d just boiled the children in the bath water.
“You are so full of —” She threw down her utensils and bolted. Clump, clump, clump went her heavy feet on the stairs. The walls shuddered with the slamming of the bedroom door.
Ron finished his biscuit carefully. Stan had the sense he wasn’t exactly sure where his next meal might be coming from.
—
The telephone in the kitchen beckoned, but there were too many bodies in the little house, not enough